HURLEY >> The Town Board has voted to join the Coalition of Lower Esopus Communities as part of an effort to demonstrate that New York City’s handling of the Ashokan Reservoir has a significant impact on Ulster County communities.

Town Supervisor Gary Bellows said the town hopes to show the city Department of Environmental Protection that the Ashokan Reservoir can be kept at a level that meets city needs without causing flooding along the Lower Esopus Creek, which runs through Hurley and several other Ulster County towns.

Other towns in the new coalition are are Saugerties, Ulster and Marbletown.

“We are going to see if the city of Kingston would also like to be involved,” Bellows said. The creek runs along part of the city’s northern border.

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The city likes to keep the reservoir’s west basin between 90 and 100 percent full, but doing so can lead to flooding along the Lower Esopus when heavy rain pushes the excess water into the creek.

Bellows, who lives along the creek, contends the regular levels at the reservoir could be lower.

“They are not going to reduce the reservoir levels the way they should be, and that’s the biggest problem,” he said.

“If one were to logically think this through ... if you leave a large enough void in the reservoir, we (downstream on the Lower Esopus Creek) won’t flood,” he said. “If it doesn’t flood, you won’t have turbidity. If you don’t have turbidity, you won’t be harming the species in the Lower Esopus and you won’t be eroding the banks so that it fills in and trees are falling in and you are ruining the ecology of the creek.”

The city controls turbidity in the reservoir by sending up to 600 million gallons of muddy water per day into the Lower Esopus so that water doesn’t reach New York City water customers.

Department of Environmental Protection spokesman Adam Bosch said maintaining appropriate water levels in the reservoir helps ensure that 9.4 million customers have water during the late summer and fall.

“An example of this is 2005, when we were actually spilling (out of the reservoir) in the spring,” he said. “... And even though we were 100 percent full on June 1, by October, we were in drought condition. So examples like that show that it is important to be full on June 1 as a matter of reliability for the water supply.”